"The results were not pretty. “They were running these tests with subsets of users, and the feedback they got internally was overwhelmingly negative. People would say, ‘I don’t understand why I’m looking at this. I don’t see the context anymore.’ There were spelling mistakes in the headlines. And the number of people talking about a topic would just be wildly off.” The negative feedback came from both Facebook employees participating in internal tests and external Facebook users randomly selected for small public tests.

The contractor assumed Facebook’s engineers and product managers would go back to the drawing board. Instead, on Friday, the company dumped the journalists and released the new, poorly reviewed version of trending news to the public."